GOCC.gov
terms: * GOCC = Government Open Code Collaborative * The system that so willfully took over Government Forge creates barriers to the accomplishment of anything useful. No way. Open Source is not about building one more bureaucracy to oversee its existing bureaucracy, with oversight over the new bureaucracy. Row Office of the Market Place. This movement of GOCC.GOV is actually good for Open Source. Open Source will go its own way, doing its own thing, and good programs such as Linux will get better, it is an engine that can't be stopped, because it represents a true antithesis movement to the proprietary world, ala Kant, Marx and Kunz. In a few years, governments will recognize their own failure, and so will its citizen constituents. Then, they will most probably try something that works, albeit 10 years late. Timing will syncronize with the retirement from public office of the current crop of duds who staff this silly plan. I am sure Harvard and MIT are involved solely for the political contacts -- they are places to send their more mediocre graduates. Perhaps row offices are a good thing. Rather than going from ten row offices in Allegheny County, let's consider adding ten and getting to 20 or more. This is part of the churn and burn trend. We let things die on the vine. More reading: * Linux Journal article on GOCC.gov Some efforts look like good ideas at first glance. Then we awake. :I thought "great, this is exactly what I've been trying to accomplish with my Alternate Route Project". I went to join up and participate in a community with more muscle and backing then my little one man show. Then the reality hit. The idea of having to find an authorized representative in my agency to enter into a membership agreement just so I could contribute free software to the cause turned me off so fast that I haven't given them a second thought. Source: Richard Brice, PE Software Applications Engineer, Washington State DOT, Bridge and Structures Office. Bureaucracy is less a function of whether something is a government of private enterprise. Instead, bureaucracy is a function of size and organizational complexity. The way to cut then is to simplify and reduce. To wrestle with the might of the free market, one does need to be big, mighty and full of punishment to those who flow in other directions. But, to go with the flow, size isn't needed and it is perhaps a hinderance. Government is often accused of being bureaucratic, but that is because most of the extremely large processes it is required to engage in, do not scale well. Engineering focuses on the affects of scale. In chemical engineering, one learns how take the laboratory experiment and move it to the bench scale demonstration, then to the pilot plant, and then hopefully into commercial operation. Each step must have an engineered process and account for the change of scale. Some processes never scale well. This is why the pressurized water reactor that worked so well in nuclear submarines at a few hundred megawatts never succeeded commercially when scaled to a commercial power plant delivering several thousand megawatts (the size of the core to deliver this increased power barely increases, however the power density is significantly higher making the risks of potential meltdown that much more difficult and hence costly to contain). Scale is the same problem that most parallel algorithms struggle with, and many parallel methods do not scale well with problem size. * Never deliberately ignoring resources that are out there. * Projects and people that deliberately ignore resources among the greater community will certainly run afoul of itself. There is so much potential for getting this right, yet Pittsburgh has many instances of shame. * Government does not need to be intrinsically bureaucratic. This campaign's intrinsic nature is to be of respect for the marketplace and to operate government for the people with the leverage of democracy. Mismanagement hits particularly in large companies too. Pittsburgh's legacy of ignoring the community means many projects were set up to fail. Pittsburgh has put projects into our shared landscape that were placeholders and were supposed to implode. Save Our Summer 04 makes a good example of a highly publicized program that was established from the get-go as a failure. The effort was a distraction to open a dozen pool and feel good while two dozen were closing. That effort had little or nothing to do with meeting the recreational needs of the children and families of Pittsburgh, establishing holistic communities, nor increasing home values throughout the city. Save Our Summer 04 wasn't going to convince anyone that Pittsburgh's neighborhoods were worthy of a home-buying investment. The mayor's 2005 budget was called a phoney budget by the Post-Gazette headlines. Tom Murphy's budget had a 35% property tax increase that was, in his words, suicidal. That is another failure at first blush. Low-speed Maglev from the mega parking garage on the Hill behind the Civic Arena to Grant Street was a massive plan with astronomical costs that was built to fail. It was to be a demonstration track. There was little to no functionality within the plan. An a larger scale, the Maglev from Greensburg to the Airport is also a failure by design. The pipedream of building an entire industry on the shoulders of a failure could only impresses clueless bureaucrats. The rest of the world will only buy-into concepts and solutions that are working in splendid, efficient ways. Prosperity's keys and Pittsburgh's keys. Linux and open source work when they work as a community engaged in cooperative development. Pittsburgh's economy and its public sector leadership can work to generate a new time of propsperity for the region when we establish a community engaged in cooperative development. Plenty of community's exist. Housing developments and neighborhoods are coast-to-coast. People can choose to live where they please. People can live in one location and work in another. With technology and the new economy, one's home live can be established nearly anywhere. People don't need to live near the mills as they did in Pittsburgh's past. Pittsburgh's only hope for a community rebirth and savation is going to be its sense of community. Pittsburgh has been driving people away. Residents move from the city because they've had enough and are fed up with closed-minded leaders, closed-door opportunities and the outward distain for rich community interaction. City council takes testimony from the public before every meeting, by law. Often, only one member of the nine on council are present at the outset of the meeting as citizens get to speak. When council does not want to hear from the people, the people will not want to be suject to rule by them. So, the people will depart. The mayor's treatment is even worse than council's no-shows at the start of council's own meetings. The Mayor's complaint center has had a central switchboard of six operators to takee and handle citizen calls to the city. The mayor's complaint center is gone. Expect an answering machine soon. That is no way to listen to people and provide service.disserttaion help The I.C.A. (Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority) acts in the same way. They didn't even publish a phone number and like to hold meetings on short notice, without public testimony.